Mortgage: a secured loan on real or leasehold property under which, technically, the property is transferred to the lender and re-transferred when the loan is repaid.
Legal Charge: in the UK, the form of security taken in lieu of a mortgage.
Hire Purchase: the finance house buys goods and rents them to the consumer for an agreed fee and transfers ownership to the consumer when the full fee is paid
Personal loan: the lending of money direct to the consumer with or without some form of security.
The banking issues that face small businesses to mega corporations. To add your expertise and opinions, click on Contribute
Microfinance is the provision of financial services to very small businesses - often individuals - of small amounts of money. Often the borrower has no effective security to offer and microfinance banking is often a matter of trust. Aimed at the group generally referred to in the derogatory term "BOP" for "bottom of pyramid," Microfinance has expanded to cover the areas of credit, savings, insurance, and remittance services. Interestingly, it is perhaps amongst the most inventive area of financial services when it comes to the use of technology, in part because it is a relatively new area and has little legacy equipment and partly because any saving in cost is important when the available profit per customer is tiny due to the amounts involved. Microfinance is seen as an essential tool in the reduction of the influence of the informal loans sector including predatory lending such as loan sharks and also in undermining the funding of drugs production by the illegal narcotics industry.